The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Tuesday, November 01, 2016

The Myth of the McMahon Line

Update, November 8, 2016: I just finished consulting Alastair Lamb's The McMahon Line: A study in the Relations between India China and Tibet, 1904 to 1914 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966). Lamb's book is a leisurely 650-page stroll through records of the British Foreign Office, declassified in the mid-1960s, that provide the foundation for the narrative provided by revisionist historians, Neville Maxwell, and in the post below.

Lamb's book makes it clear that the Simla Convention was an unsuccessful gambit in a game of multi-dimensional chess played between Great Britain, British India, Tibet, China, Russia, and Mongolia, and involving interests in Afghanistan, Persia, Nepal, Sinkang and Burma. Although Great Britain and British India were the driving force behind Simla and most key developments are documented in the records of the Foreign Office (including telegram intercepts revealing the Chinese negotiating strategy), a heroic and multi-lingual scholar could probably put together a fascinating narrative by adding Tibetan, Chinese, and Russian sources to the mix.

The key topic of the tripartite negotiations between Great Britain, Tibet, and China was the definition of a border between China and Tibet (relatively trivial, since it was understood that Tibetan regions adjacent to China would be administered by China anyway), and the drawing of a second, crucial interior border creating Inner and Outer Tibet.

The British intention was to establish "Outer Tibet"--controlled by a weak and friendly state under the Dalai Lama that had made its foreign relations subject to a British veto--and not China, as the primary point of contact between British India and the northeast. The pricetag for China's surrender of its claims and opportunities in "Outer Tibet" would be obtaining undisputed sway over "Inner Tibet".

During the negotiations, there was a lot of scribbling of proposed boundaries between Chinese and Tibetan zones of control on the map. Unsurprisingly, the Chinese motto was "Go West" and its most extreme proposal placed the boundary between Inner and Outer Tibet 100 miles from Lhasa. The British, with Tibetan acquiescence, pushed back in the west but alienated Tibetan territory in the east and north with a free hand, as long as a direct "Inner Tibet" a.k.a. China border presence down by Assam (a.k.a. British India, "the precious") could be avoided.Here's some competing border ideas (Lamb, pg. 485)...

... and the final proposal (in which "Kokonor" a.k.a. today's Qinghai was signed off to China as well as a vast tract north of the Kunlun Mountains). This is the arrangement the Chinese representative initialed but the Chinese government repudiated and refused to ratify. [Lamb, pg. 518]

The Simla Convention foundered on the inability of China and Great Britain to come to terms over the boundary between "Inner" and "Outer" Tibet. The boundary between "Outer" Tibet and British India was not a topic of the tripartite negotiations, understandably since the very purpose of the Simla Convention was to ensure that Tibet, and not China would be British India's designated interlocutor in the northeast.

Negotiations on the boundary that came to be known as the McMahon Line were a bilateral British-Tibetan show. In fact, maybe only a British India-Tibetan show.

An interesting lacunae in the historical records covered by Lamb concerns the details of the negotiations between the British Indian and Tibetan representatives about placement of the McMahon Line. According to Lamb (pg. 546), the contents of these negotiations were not even minuted to the Foreign Office in London, another indication that something considerably less than a negotiation between sovereign states was going on. It would be interesting if these records could be made to appear.

It is known that the key area of concern in delineating the border between British India and "suzerain' Tibet was the "Tawang Tract", a thumb of land at the western terminus of the proposed "McMahon Line" next to Bhutan. Here's a nice map Andy Proehl drew for China Matters a few years back to give the lay of the land.

Lamb makes the noteworthy observation that Tawang was in several
respects a poisoned chalice for the British and Indian
governments.

Lamb documents the lust of British India for Tawang as a strategic asset. In 1907, the Indian General Staff noted "[Tawang] is a dangerous wedge thrust between the Miri country [Assam tribal area to the east of Tawang] and Bhutan. A comparatively easy and much-used trade route traverses this wedge from north to south, by which the Chinese would be able to exert influence or pressure on Bhutan...a rectification of the boundary here is imperative..." [Lamb, pg. 534]

However, Tawang was indisputably part of Tibet, culturally, religiously, and politically. The town of Tawang was (and still is) the site of a large and important monastery affiliated with the Drepung Monastery in Lhasa that administered territorial holdings in Tawang through its monks. Second, the northern part of Tawang was also incorporated into the administrative structure of the Tibetan government.

Surrendering Tawang was a major concession by the Tibetan government to Great Britain, one that could only be justified if the Simla Convention secured either peace and a mutually recognized border with China, or significant and effective military and diplomatic assistance from Great Britain to Tibet as the dispute with China ground on. Neither of these materialized and the Tibetan government subsequently declared the McMahon Line was a dead letter and continued to tax and administer Tawang.

Problematically, inclusion of the Tawang Tract below the McMahon Line also made a mockery of subsequent claims that the Line in any way reflected a natural ethnic or geographic boundary between India and Tibet.

The fact that McMahon moved the line north during the negotiations with the Tibetan delegation (it was first considered adequate to control the Se La Pass, the limit of Tibetan government administration, but then the line was moved north to encompass the monastery itself, presumably because the powerful monastery held authorities over communities south of the pass) is another indication of its less than organic character. [Lamb, pg. 535]

My proposed title, Uncle Sam Plays the Great Game in Arunachal
Pradesh, didn't make the cut.

In my piece I take the visit of the US Ambassador to
India, Richard Verma, as an opportunity to unpack the history and significance
of the 1914 Simla Convention between Great Britain, Tibet, and China, an
imperial episode which also saw the birth of the notorious McMahon Line.

The McMahon Line is notorious since India unilaterally—and
with some help from the United States and zero agreement from the PRC—asserts
that the McMahon Line is the indisputable boundary between India and the PRC in
India’s Northeast.

The McMahon Line is a hot-button issue for Tibetan
nationalists as well, since Great Britain negotiated it directly with the
government of Tibet, so supporting the McMahon Line delivers the dual benefits of
supporting the narrative of the existence of a recognized independent Tibetan
government and giving aid and comfort
to the Tibetan diaspora’s Indian patron.

The actual situation and significant consequence of the
McMahon Line is complicated but, I believe, accessible thanks to some deft
historical research by several scholars and despite some litigating by Indian
and Tibetan partisans.

Having said that, I welcome correction and instruction, so
in this post I’m going to lay out the arguments behind the assertions in my
SCMP piece in greater detail.For
sourcing, I lean on Neville Maxwell India’s
China War (Maxwell was the Times of
London’s India correspondent during the 1962 war and a key figure in
revisionist analysis of the roots of the war), and an unpublished
dissertation by Dr. Heather Spence, British
policy and the ‘development’ of Tibet, 1912-1933, that I found very
informative on the diplomatic and geopolitical context of the Great
Britain-Tibet relationship pre-and-post-Simla.

The story of the McMahon Line is inseparable from—but not
identical with—the story of the Simla Convention negotiations between Great
Britain—represented by Henry McMahon--China, and Tibet at the hill town of
Simla in India in 1914.

First off, the key and most interesting aspects of the Simla
Convention are both the de facto independence
of Tibet (which had expelled the Chinese by 1914 and had a government in Lhasa
under the Dalai Lama with effective control over much of the area of Tibet)…and
Great Britain’s consistent and overriding interest in denying de
jure independence for Tibet.

Great Britain was obsessed, perhaps unhealthily so, with
playing the “Great Game”: forestalling the southern creep of Russian influence
in Asia toward India.

In India’s northeast, this translated into the desire to
establish Tibet as a buffer state that was pro-British and secure.

“Pro-British” was not an issue in 1914, since the Dalai Lama
at the time was an ardent Anglophile who had spent several years of exile in
the sympathetic company of the British administrator Charles Bell.

“Secure” was the problem.The Raj had no interest in rolling the geopolitical dice by endorsing
Tibetan independence and with it the possibility that a hostile new regime and adverse
set of circumstances might bring the Chinese or Russians into Tibet and up to
India’s doorstep; but it also lacked the will or capacity to assert and enforce
a unilateral protectorate over Tibet.

It was deemed
necessary that, if and when China emerged from the chaos of the 1911 Revolution
as a power-projecting state, it would acquiesce to the existence of an
autonomous Tibetan government that had a special relationship with Great
Britain.

So Henry McMahon summoned Tibetan and Chinese
representatives to Simla to order the relations between Tibet and China, and
between Tibet and Great Britain.The
Tibetans were eager to attend; the Chinese were compelled by McMahon’s threat
that he would conclude a bilateral agreement with Tibet if they didn’t show up.

One can speculate—and I will—that the Chinese showed up
primarily to stall and throw a spanner in the works.Simla acknowledged China’s role—and also gave
China the chance to act as the spoiler, by participating in the negotiations
but refusing to endorse the outcome.

The core of the British agenda at Simla was to partition
Tibet into “Inner” and “Outer” Tibet as the Russians had just done with “Inner”
and “Outer” Mongolia.Inner Tibet, the
parts abutting Sichuan in which Chinese control was stronger, would be
incorporated into China.Outer Tibet—the
big part, the strategic part, the highlands run out of Lhasa by the Dalai
Lama—would not become independent: it would be an autonomous government lacking
control over its foreign affairs.

Autonomy, but autonomy of a specific type was
preferred.McMahon came up with the idea
of “suzerainty”.

“Suzerainty” served multiple purposes.By invoking a Chinese aegis, “suzerainty” was
a legal fig leaf providing diplomatic cover to Great Britain, which had
concluded an agreement with Russia in 1907 that promised neither state would
conduct direct negotiations with the Tibetan government.At the same time, “suzerainty” was intended
to forestall any claims from Russia and other nations that “Outer Tibet” was
part of China and therefore subject to the Open Door policy declaring that the
rights and access of one state in China were to be enjoyed by all.

But most importantly, “suzerainty” was used to assert that,
by China’s leave, Tibet would be autonomous, but still conduct its foreign affairs independently with respect to only
to one, and only one country: Great Britain.

So, in essence, the Simla Convention was designed to secure
a special relationship between Great Britain and Tibet with Chinese endorsement
to compensate for the fact that Great Britain lacked the resolve to secure
Tibet as a formal British protectorate.

The Chinese, however, did not endorse.The Chinese representative initialed the draft
agreement, but the Chinese government withheld authorization to sign.

To explain its refusal, the Chinese government placed the
onus on the issue of boundary delimitation.

The Chinese foreign affairs office formally notified Great
Britain that “This Government has several
times stated that it gives its support to the majority of the articles of the
Convention.The part which it is unable
to agree to is that dealing with the question of boundary. [Spence, pg. 36]

I expect it was McMahon’s fallback plan from the gitgo to
try to take in the bilateral what China refused to cede in the trilateral.

McMahon had been instructed by London not to sign
bilaterally with just Tibet, but he decided to exceed his instructions,
concluding an agreement with Tibet that finessed the Chinese non-participation in
the Simla Convention with a declaration that China, by not signing, had
simply forfeited the privileges for China negotiated in the Convention.

According to this
formula, Great Britain and Tibet would execute the parts of the Convention that
pertained to them—mainly diplomatic (Tibet would not enter into agreements with
any other foreign power without Britain’s OK) and trade.The agreement waived all tariffs between
British India and Tibet, a piece of free-trade maneuvering that advantaged the
Raj but caused no small fiscal problems and resentment of the Tibetan
government (which had relied on taxing exports of wool to India for a
significant part of its revenue) in the 1920s.

At Simla the Chinese representative, Ivan Chen, was excluded
from these discussions, unaware of the content of the bilateral undertakings,
and invited to go to a separate room while British and Tibetan representatives
signed them.Correction: According to Lamb: "Signing of the [bilateral British-Tibetan declaration] was done in Chen's presence; but McMahon reported with some satisfaction, 'the nature of the documents executed at the meeting is not known to the Chinese plenipotentiary, who, I am now given to understand, believes the Convention was signed. This impression I have not thought it necessary to correct.'" [Lamb, pg. 519]

Unsurprisingly, Chen declared
the Chinese government would not recognize any agreement concluded bilaterally
between Great Britain and Tibet, a declaration that was repeated by the Chinese
Minister in London.

No one regarded the gains of the bilateral track as an
adequate replacement for a trilateral pact.

It was understood by all concerned—Great Britain, India,
Tibet, China, indeed, McMahon himself—Simla was a bust.McMahon reported to London:

It is with great
regret that I leave India without having secured the formal adherence of the
Chinese Government to a Tripartite Agreement…The fact is that the negotiations
at Simla…broke down… [Maxwell, 49]

Mindful that without
China’s formal participation the agreement at Simla was in conflict with the
1907 convention with Russia, Great Britain did not publish the Simla
Convention.Instead, it belatedly took
notice of the negotiations in its official compendium, Aitchison’s Treaties and Sanads 1929 Edition Volume XIV, with the terse
remark: “The convention was initialled and sealed on 3 July 1914. As this
Convention was not signed and ratified by all three parties, the current
Chinese Government does not consider itself bound by the terms of this
convention.”

As for the McMahon Line, it was a separate bilateral sideshow
to the main issue of trying to demarcate a border between Tibet and China
a.k.a. “Inner” and “Outer” Tibet trilaterally at Simla.

Prior to and contemporaneously with the tripartite
negotiations on the Simla Convention, the British and Tibetan teams had
conducted bilateral discussions in Delhi and Simla as to the position of the boundary
between India and Tibet.

Since Great Britain regarded Tibet as de facto autonomous in its dealings with Great Britain (and
presumably hopeful the special relationship would be shortly confirmed at Simla
as de jure) , no effort was made
during the negotiations to involve China, with rather disastrous implications
for the future.

In 1962, India would be
facing not the Tibetan government across the McMahon Line but the People’s
Republic of China, which with very good reason considered itself in no way
bound as a successor to any previous border negotiations.

With equally disastrous consequences for Nehru and India in
1962, McMahon, instead of drawing the boundary in the foothills of the
Himalayas, drew it along the crestline, in easy reach of attackers from the
north but virtually indefensible from the south.

The key horsetrading occurred in the matter of the “Tawang
Tract”.Tawang was an indisputable locus
of Tibetan control, with a big monastery dominating a fertile valley at the
southern reaches of the Tibetan plateau and also dominating, in a less than admirable way, a local population of ethnic Manpo serfs exploited in the most dire
fashion.

By virtue of its riverine topography, Tawang straddled an
important trade route between Lhasa and northern India and was therefore seen
as a potential military threat/power point that the Raj wished to control.

In the bilateral British-Tibetan boundary discussions, the
western terminus of McMahon’s line crept north until it included all of Tawang.The Tibetan delegation was apparently not
happy about this state of affairs but accepted it as the price of British
support and with the reassurance that they could continue to tax Tawang despite
its inclusion into British India.The
Indian-Tibetan boundary agreement was enshrined in an 8 mile to the inch map
and held in two copies, one by the British and one in Lhasa.

The McMahon Line was introduced into the Simla negotiations
through the back door, as it were, by presenting it as a fait accompli on the large-scale map intended for attachment to the
Simla Convention as a continuation of the crucial line defining the boundary
between Inner and Outer Tibet which had indeed been the subject of genuine
tripartite negotiations.

Interestingly, the British and Tibetans also bilaterally
extended the boundary to enclose Aksai Chin, a barren waste to the west of Tibet,
as Tibetan (not Indian) territory in order to give Tibet the incentive or
responsibility to keep the Russians out of that sensitive strategic area.

Ivan Chen initialed the treaty and map—the sole, shakybasis for India’s subsequent insistence that
China had accepted the McMahon Line—but was rebuked by Peking for exceeding his
instructions and, as noted above, declined to sign the final Convention.

At the time, as recorded in Aitchison, it was universally understood that China had rejected
the Simla Convention, and that this was a problem that overshadowed whatever
informal gains had accrued to Britain through the bilateral agreements with
Tibet.We know this thanks to documents
demonstrating that both the Tibetans and Great Britain clung to the Simla
“suzerainty” gambit, and that they labored fruitlessly for decades to get China
back to the negotiating table to validate the policy.

The key concern was that China, by refusing to sign the
tripartite Simla Convention, had refused to countenance the Inner/Outer Tibet
arrangement that would have fixed the Sino-Tibetan border, assured the autonomy and security of the government
in Lhasa-- and justified to Lhasa Great Britain’s extensive, unique, and
increasingly onerous diplomatic and trading privileges in “Outer Tibet”.

Immediately
subsequent to the Simla negotiations, 1915, internal British correspondence
characterized the Simla Convention as “invalid” [Spence, pg. 59] and, in the
context of the Great War, without basis as an obligation for arming Lhasa to
forestall Chinese mischief.In 1919, the
Tibetan chief minister evocatively expressed his concern that Tibet would find
itself abandoned “like tiny fledglings on an open plain.” [Spence, pg. 48]

As for China, instead of returning to negotiations and acquiescing to “suzerainity” over a
virtually independent Tibet--an arrangement it was perhaps only pretending to
countenance before it backed out at Simla, when China was
flat on its back and the Raj was at its zenith—it preferred to mass troops on
Tibet’s Sichuan frontier and agitate for direct engagement with Lhasa.

It soon became apparent that China was, shall we say, the
“rising power” in the Himalayan regions, the British were the “declining
power”, and it became a matter of considerable anxiety in Lhasa that China was
piling up troops in the eastern marches and the Tibetan government was being
forced to confront these forces without any significant military or diplomatic
support from Great Britain.

Faced with niggardly and tardy provision of guns and
ammunition by Great Britain, Lhasa began playing footsie with Russia and Japan
via Mongolia to pursue the supply of arms; amazingly, Great Britain was able to
veto these initiatives thanks to the special position in Tibetan security
affairs it had negotiated bilaterally at Simla.

The Tibetan government came to understand that the Simla
Convention and the idea that Britain had the sincerity and capacity to protect
Tibet against China were, at best, on life support.

By 1936, a British political officer reported on the mood in
Lhasa as follows:

They regarded the
adjustment of the Tibet-Indian boundary as part and parcel of the general
adjustment and determination of boundaries contemplated in the 1914
Convention.If they could, with our
help, secure a definite Sino-Tibetan boundary they would of course be glad to
observe the Indo-Tibetan border as defined in 1914… [Maxwell, 59]

With Simla moribund, the McMahon Line was never demarcated
on the ground and as a result it never acquired any customary force as a
precedent.

Notably, there were no serious efforts to assert effective
British rule in the remote tribal reaches of the McMahon line, or even over
Tawang until the 1930s.Then, with the
Japanese menace replacing Russia as the focus of the Great Britain’s anxieties
concerning northern encroachment, the Raj adopted a policy which might be
characterized as “F*ck Tibet”: unilaterally extending British control
northwards without reference to the original and unrealized vision of backing
Tibet in return for the trade and territorial privileges that Great Britain had
negotiated two decades before.

At this point, Olaf
Caroe enters the picture.Caroe was a
key official in the British Raj and an enthusiastic geopolitical
strategist.In 1935, Tibetan authorities
in Tawang arrested a British spy/botanist and the government in Lhasa made the
decision, unwise in retrospect, to issue a protest to the British authorities
and thereby bring Lhasa’s claims to Tawang to Caroe’s attention.

In response, Caroe pulled off a rather notorious subterfuge
in order to buttress the British claim to Tawang: he published the Simla
Convention for the first time in 1938 with a note misrepresenting that it had
included settlement of the border (and alienation of Tawang); and he arranged
for the publication of official Survey of India maps that, for the first time,
showed the McMahon Line as the official boundary.To advance the narrative, he also
corresponded with commercial atlas publishers to put the McMahon Line on their
maps as well.

In a telling indication of Caroe’s jiggery-pokery, to avoid
the awkward question of why he was first publishing the Simla Convention twenty-four
years after the fact in 1938, he instead arranged for the surreptitious
printing of a spurious back-dated edition of Aitchison, deleting the original note about the Chinese government’s
non-signature, and replacing it with a lengthy note stating, quite falsely,
that “The [Simla] Convention included a definition of boundaries…”

Since 1) the McMahon Line had been concluded
in secret bilateral negotiations between Tibet and Great Britain outside the
Convention and 2) the Chinese had officially refused to recognize any bilateral
agreement, boundary or otherwise, between Tibet and Great Britain and 3) had declined
to sign the Simla Convention itself and 4) had notified Great Britain in 1914
that the specific sticking point was “the boundaries” this was hoo-hah.

The replacement copy was distributed to various libraries
with instructions to withdraw and destroy the original edition.

The subterfuge was only discovered in 1963 when J.A. Addis,
a British diplomat, discovered a surviving copy of the original edition at
Harvard and compared it to Caroe’s version.

That was too late for Nehru, who apparently sincerely
accepted Caroe’s maps as holy writ i.e. the accurate depiction of borders that
had been trilaterally negotiated at Simla, published, openly acknowledged, and a
moral imperative and worthy object of Indian military defense in 1962.

It was also too late for Harvard’s own John Kenneth
Galbraith, who as ambassador to India successfully lobbied President Kennedy to
declare the McMahon Line as India’s recognized border, apparently as part of
his campaign to support India and elevate the PRC-India conflict beyond the
mundane sphere of “clash over disputed border” to “Chicom aggression against
India”.

In response to Galbraith’s urgings, President Kennedy overrode
the concerns of the State Department and the vociferous objections of Chiang
Kai-shek on Taiwan (the government of China in 1962 as far as the US was
concerned) to give Galbraith the leeway to announce “The McMahon Line is the
accepted international border and is sanctioned by modern usage.Accordingly we regard it as the northern
border of the [North East Frontier Agency] region.”

Well, “accepted international border sanctioned by modern
usage” is something of a stretch. As noted above, not
only the Chinese but the Tibetan government of the 1930s, itself to be
extinguished by the Chinese in 1959, regarded the McMahon Line as a
dead letter.

In discussions with Nehru in the 1950s, Zhou Enlai had made
the rather telling statement that “he had never heard of the McMahon
Line”.The Chinese government only
understood the full extent of the boundary understandings between the Tibetan
and British governments in 1914 after the PLA seized documents in the Potala
Palace during the 1959 invasion, and Zhou subsequently declared the McMahon
Line a piece of imperial fraud.Imperial
historians—Addis, Maxwell, and Lamb--had the opportunity to examine British
records a few years later, when the fifty-year embargo on government records expired,
and agreed with Zhou.

The revelation of these contacts made a good case for de facto Tibetan independence between
the two world wars; unfortunately, they also at the same time clearly
demonstrated that the Chinese government had never been party to them, or to the
McMahon Line.

Much has been made in Indian and Tibetan nationalist circles
of Zhou Enlai’s willingness to use the McMahon Line as the basis for a border
settlement between India and the PRC.However, this had nothing to do with any acknowledgment of the legitimacy
of the line (which, after all, had never been demarcated in the field) and
perhaps had something to do with the fact that, as the 1962 war demonstrated,
the task of defending the McMahon Line on the edge of the Tibetan plateau is a
tremendous strategic burden for India.

The truth about the legal and military aspects of the 1962
Sino-Indian War are, I would venture, still a matter of denial and
disinformation, especially in India.The
Henderson-Brooks Report, which details the strategic and operational failings
of the Indian military establishment in 1962, has never been declassified, despite
Prime Minister Modi’s previous promises in that regard; only portions of it
are in the public domain thanks to Neville Maxwell, who somehow got his hands
on a copy.

Asserting the purported
sanctity of the McMahon Line (and Chinese perfidy in refusing to honor it) is a
staple of the patriotic narrative, and a litmus test for states eager to develop an India alliance and not averse to irritating China in the process. In addition to the SCMP This Week in Asia piece I link to above, here's something I wrote in 2015 about the role the McMahon Line dispute plays in contemporary Indian international relations.

In its combination of nationalist posturing and
pseudo-historical bullsh*t, the Indian position on the McMahon Line bookends
the PRC’s claims in the South China Sea in interesting ways.

And, of course, the United States, as part of its
pro-India/anti-China tilt is more interested in enabling the myths of the
McMahon Line than supporting resolution of the Sino-Indian border dispute
through equitable negotiation.

That's a nice and detailed post but there are 2 things to add here - 1) China did not really control Tibet at that time so they never needed to be decision makers in the boundary demarcation between India and Tibet2) The native people of Arunachal Pradesh (including Tawang) are firmly with India and don't give 2 hoots for China.Thanks,Viva